neuralgia. What is it to him
that you can localize and name by some uncouth term the disease which
you could not prevent and which you cannot cure? An old woman who knows
how to make a poultice and how to put it on, and does it tuto, eito,
jucunde, just when and where it is wanted, is better,--a thousand times
better in many cases,--than a staring pathologist, who explores and
thumps and doubts and guesses, and tells his patient be will be better
tomorrow, and so goes home to tumble his books over and make out a
diagnosis.

But in those days, I, like most of my fellow students, was thinking much
more of "science" than of practical medicine, and I believe if we had
not clung so closely to the skirts of Louis and had followed some of
the courses of men like Trousseau,--therapeutists, who gave special
attention to curative methods, and not chiefly to diagnosis,--it would
have been better for me and others. One thing, at any rate, we did
learn in the wards of Louis. We learned that a very large proportion of
diseases get well of themselves, without any special medication,--the
great fact formulated, enforced, and popularized by Dr. Jacob Bigelow
in the Discourse referred to. We unlearned the habit of drugging for its
own sake. This detestable practice, which I was almost proscribed for
condemning somewhat too epigrammatically a little more than twenty years
ago, came to us, I suspect, in a considerable measure from the English
"general practitioners," a sort of prescribing apothecaries. You
remember how, when the city was besieged, each artisan who was called
upon in council to suggest the best means of defence recommended the
articles he dealt in: the carpenter, wood; the blacksmith, iron; the
mason, brick; until it came to be a puzzle to know which to adopt. Then
the shoemaker said, "Hang your walls with new boots," and gave good
reasons why these should be the best of all possible defences. Now the
"general practitioner" charged, as I understand, for his medicine,
and in that way got paid for his visit. Wherever this is the practice,
medicine is sure to become a trade, and the people learn to expect
drugging, and to consider it necessary, because drugs are so universally
given to the patients of the man who gets his living by them.

It was something to have unlearned the pernicious habit of constantly
giving poisons to a patient, as if they were good in themselves, of
drawing off the blood which he would want in his str